How Many Points is Your Player Worth? (Rev. 2)

Arturo Galletti is the Co-editor and Director of Analytics for the Wages of Wins Network. He is an Electrical Engineer with General Electric in the lovely isle of Puerto Rico, where he keeps his production lines running by day and night (and weekends) and works on sport analysis with his free time.

The Wins Produced metric works great when looking over how much a player helped our hurt your team for a season or over their career. When trying to discuss game to game though it can be a little abstract. Luckily the Wins Produced formula is all about converting points (or the difference in points using efficiency differential) to wins so what if we convert wins back to points? It’s easy enough to do with the following formula.

Point Margin = 31 .0 (Wins Produced-Wins Produced by an Average player)

(Editor Arturo’s Note: I screwed this up again :-) . Fixed now)

Basically the difference in Wins Produced for a player versus an average player can be mapped directly to point margin (go here if you want the full detail behind that equation). Let’s illustrate this as well (for simplicity I’m using .100 WP48 as the player average, it’s actually .099). Here’s a break down of how that works on a minute by minute basis.

Trotting out a star (0.250 WP48) is like spotting your team 4-5 points. Trotting out a player like Bargnani? Just the opposite. Trotting out an average player doesn’t gain you any points, but it doesn’t lose you any either.

For quick review of how the best players are helping their team here are the top 30 players, in terms of Point Margin per game.

Starting Kevin Love is like giving your team an eight point advantage (we’ll get to that more in a second.) The Heat got a 11.4 point boost every game LeBron and Wade showed up. Why don’t teams with these players win every game? Well let’s also check out the bottom players.

Bargnani is essentially an anti Dwyane Wade giving his team a 5 point handicap each game. Kevin Love’s 8.4 points can only handle Darko, Beasley and Flynn and the Wolves have even more bad players after that. Luckily the bad players hurt a little less than the good players help. For the most part at least.

Epke Udoh is Mr. Negative in all of the WP measures. He does not score or rebound. He does, however, have a wonderful +/- for players with more than 1000 minutes. When the same 4 Warriors starters were with Biedrins they were very minus, and with Udoh the same 4 were very plus, apples to apples etc.

I’ve been asking Arturo about this for months, it seems. I am curious if the anomaly is real, and whether there are other true anomaly players.

John,
The issue here is using the +/- metric to measure the WP metric. The PM family is inconsistent at best and should not be used as a means of judgement when we’re discussing something else that there is a very clear metric for (Actual Wins)

In terms of anomalous players, I’m sure they exist. With 500+ players even at a 99% hit rate you’d still see 4-5 misclassifications. The rule I stand by is to use the stats as a starting point and then dig not the other way around. It is very common to say “I know Derrick Rose is great, do the stats agree” the better way is to go “The stats say Derrick Rose is good, do I have any counter arguments?”